User Centred Design: Techniques to improve the user experience

If you are involved in specifying how a system or product will look and function this course will make it easier for you to do your job effectively.  Project managers, engineers, designers, developers and analysts from IT, commercial or marketing functions can all benefit from learning about the user centred design process.

Why you should attend
User centred design techniques help you understand your users better and design effective, efficient and satisfying products and systems. The benefits include:

• increased sales
• improved customer satisfaction
• better productivity
• increased sales conversion rates
• projects completed to time and budget
• no expensive last minute revisions.

You will learn techniques to help you understand your users better and put them at the centre of your design process. This will help you design products which are efficient, effective and satisfying to use while minimising development time and costs.

Expected outcomes
After successfully completing this course, you will be able to:

• Appreciate how understanding your customers will make it easier to do your work
• Build pictures of your customers, their environments, and what they want to do with your product
• Incorporate usability principles into your development process for any system or product, even those with very tight deadlines
• Apply international standards in user centred design (ISO 13407)
• Track projects to ensure they remain user and business focused

Course duration
This is a two day course.

Course content
The in-house course can be customised to meet the overall needs of your business, and those of specific project teams, using examples from your own business. It provides theory, case studies and examples as well as hands-on activities for participants to practice their new skills.

The content of a typical course includes:

• Applying the User Centred Design approach to your business
• Business benefits of a User Centred Design approach
• Guidelines and Standards
• Knowing your target users and capturing their requirements
• Translating requirements to conceptual design and release criteria
• Prototyping techniques
• Measuring and testing usability.

There is a written assessment included at the end of course.

System Concepts provide a comprehensive course manual. The IEHF provides a certificate to all participants who successfully complete the assessment.

There are no pre-requisites

This course is run in-house at a client's own premises and as a public course every other month at System Concept offices in the Strand.

Cost
The public course costs £675+VAT per head. The in-house course costs £3,300 +VAT for a maximum of 12 participants giving a cost of £275 +VAT per head for a full course. The cost to customise the course to use processes and examples from your own business starts at £500.